Continuing from Part 1 about Meyer’s retracted paper that he claims was peer-reviewed (but no one can verify), Meyer says this:
Despite the intense furor, there was no formal scientific response to my article: neither the Proceedings nor any other scientific journal published a scientific refutation.
Seriously? No one refutes this either, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. If lack of refutation was the only requirement for being right, then we would be in serious trouble. No, the requirement for being right is that you have to actually be right and have evidence to back up your claim. Meyer doesn’t do that.
Meyer, curiously, then goes on to admit that there were refutations of his paper (long one here by Alan Gishlick, Nick Matzke, and Wesley R. Elsberry ). Indeed, Meyer’s article was published on August 4th. The review he mentions by Gishlick, Matzke, and Elsberry (hereafter referred to as Meyer’s Hopeless Monster) was published on August 24th at Panda’s Thumb.
I think it amusing that Meyer relies on no one publishing a peer-reviewed refutation to support his case. By doing this Meyer says that peer-review is somehow important to his case. Of course, then one must ask where are the peer-reviewed papers supporting Intelligent Design? Why does Meyer choose to ignore the hundreds of thousands of peer-reviewed papers on evolution, when he desperately attempted to get ID into peer-review.
Let me quote from Meyer’s Hopeless Monster:
There is nothing wrong with challenging conventional wisdom – continuing challenge is a core feature of science. But challengers should at least be aware of, read, cite, and specifically rebut the actual data that supports conventional wisdom, not merely construct a rhetorical edifice out of omission of relevant facts, selective quoting, bad analogies, knocking down strawmen, and tendentious interpretations. Unless and until the “intelligent design” movement does this, they are not seriously in the game. They’re not even playing the same sport.
Where have we seen this before? Oh yeah, in this very detailed review of Meyer’s latest book where he misrepresents scientists, doesn’t cite all evidence, and ignores relevant facts. Not to mention poor analogies and an utter disregard for the actual science.
Scientists have to play in and respect reality. Creationists live in a fantasy world where facts and reality are not welcome.
So what is the big argument about? Well, it’s simple really. Where do new genes come from?
Meyer asserts in his paper (and in this book) that
- the Cambrian required a massive amount of new information
- that the higher orders of life are real things and not artifacts of fossilization and our classification scheme
- that these organisms required new proteins and new body plans that never before existed
- that these new proteins and new body plans are extremely complex and highly specified
- These complex and specified things are highly improbable therefore evolution can’t have done it
That long response I linked to has very detailed explanations of why these claims are all wrong. I’ll be happy to talk about it, but the authors already have. That response includes 49 citations (including three by Axe). There’s a lot to wade through there.
That’s the thing I’ve noticed over the years (and especially, this review). Creationists, even the ones like Meyer and Axe aren’t really interested in learning. They aren’t interested in doing the research. They aren’t interested in finding things that don’t support their claims, understanding them, and doing the kind of work required to support their own claims and refute their detractors.
Meyer shows that to a ‘t’ here. He simply ignores the papers that contradict his claims. That’s not how research is done. That’s not how science books are written.
Meyer, indeed, chooses to reject science. Saying:
Elsewhere Matzke, along with biologist Paul Gross, stated that the paper by Long “reviews all the mutational processes involved in the origin of new genes and then lists dozens of examples in which research groups have reconstructed the genes’ origins.”9 In their view, “Competent scientists know how new genetic information arises.”10
But do evolutionary biologists really know this?
Let’s take a closer look at the article that allegedly shows “how new genetic information arises.”11
What’s very curious is that all three of those references (9, 10, and 11) in the chapter refer to the same article. But it’s not the Long paper referred to in the text… or, for that matter, in the Elsberry response.
Here, I must admit some confusion. Meyer is either a poor researcher or a poor writer (or both). At the bottom of page 210 he refers to the response
Gishlick, Matzke, and Elsberry’s response, which they titled “Meyer’s Hopeless Monster.”
He then says that these three authors refer to a paper in their work:
“The Origin of New Genes: Glimpses from the Young and Old,” had appeared in Nature Reviews Genetics in 2003. Gishlick, Matzke, and Elsberry asserted that this paper—coauthored by Manyuan Long, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago, and several colleagues—was representative of an extensive “scientific literature documenting the origin of new genes.”7
I am confused by this slightly. The reason is (after talking with two of the authors of Meyer’s Hopeless Monster) that the article Meyer is talking about was only referenced as an article that Meyer ignored. Along with 13 other articles that Meyer ignored.
These articles were not specifically mentioned in the text of Meyer’s Hopeless Monster… again, except for as part of a list of articles that Meyer ignored. Meyer also ignores the articles that are directly discussed in Meyer’s Hopeless Monster, choosing to focus on this one. I wonder why.
To continue with Meyer’s confusion, reference 7 (in the quote above) as well as 8,9, and 10 (third quote above) all reference, not Meyer’s Hopeless Monster, but a chapter out of a book called Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools
So, what did Gross and Matzke actually say. Sorry for the wall of text, but I think it relevant.
It would be no exaggeration to say that this argument is at the heart of the ID movement. The only problem is that it is scandalously wrong. Competent scientists know how new genetic information arises: a variety of will-understood mutational mechanisms copy and modify the DNA latter sequence that makes up a gene. If the new sequence is advantageous to the organism, natural selection spreads the new gene through the population by way of well-understood process of population genetics. This shows where new genetic information comes from, and it fully explains, as a bonus, the otherwise puzzling fact that most genes belong to large families and superfamilies of similar composition.
One particularly useful paper was published in Nature Reviews Genetics in 2003; written by Manyuan Long of the University of Chicago, it reviews all the mutational processes involved in the origin of new genes and then lists dozens of examples in which research groups have reconstructed the genes’ origins. The paper lists 122 references, virtually all of them published in the last ten years. None has ever been mentioned by the ID movement, let along rebutted. Dr. Long has devoted his whole career to studying the origin of new genes; his online resume lists some two dozen recent publications on the topic.
So what does this tell us. First, the paper that Meyer seems to think is the basis of the origin of new genes is just a review paper. The real studies involved are those 122 (slightly fewer) papers that detail how we know that those mechanisms produce new genes.
Meyer does not address or acknowledge those papers. Indeed, as we shall see, Meyer gets confused about science again and unwittingly causes the entire structure of ID to fail.
It’s about to get very interesting, as our own commenter has made clear. Stay tuned.
